I don't disagree but the idea of equating software development with some sort of artistry also allows the existence of the 10x programmer as, you know, a more gifted artists. Whether any one of us believes in 10x'ers aside, there are a lot of problems with this from the perspective of those paying the salaries, not least of which it means developers are not simply interchangeable cogs in a machine/process.
The most horrendous application I ever worked on was a java servlet app where the original developers didn't understand thread safety. They didn't let that stop them though. Every collection was a synchronized list or concurrent hash map, every access was wrapped in a mutex or synchronized{} block. It was really really bad; lots of race conditions and deadlocks, lots of production outages and a lot of "add more locks". In the neighborhood of 200,000 lines of this. It was "artistry" of a sort.
That application got the company to IPO, so the business owners were overjoyed with it. What's the point? Gatekeepers can gatekeep, artists can create art, but even the most banal garbage can make someone a lot of money.
The most horrendous application I ever worked on was a java servlet app where the original developers didn't understand thread safety. They didn't let that stop them though. Every collection was a synchronized list or concurrent hash map, every access was wrapped in a mutex or synchronized{} block. It was really really bad; lots of race conditions and deadlocks, lots of production outages and a lot of "add more locks". In the neighborhood of 200,000 lines of this. It was "artistry" of a sort.
That application got the company to IPO, so the business owners were overjoyed with it. What's the point? Gatekeepers can gatekeep, artists can create art, but even the most banal garbage can make someone a lot of money.